Teaching What Will Matter to Our Children:

Drivers: Underpinning the whole curriculum are three key drivers, specially chosen to tackle context-specific issues in our academy. They meet the needs of the community and the children, preparing them for life beyond Hillcrest. Our key drivers are problem solving, enterprise and community. Enterprise becomes a focus for at least one term each year for each phase, whereas community and problem solving drive creative themes throughout.

Skills: Learning activities develop carefully selected, transferable skills that progress over the seven years of primary schooling. Explicit teaching of these skills leads to their application in a context relating to the creative theme. Children are made aware of the skills they develop and discussion focuses on how skills can be used in other contexts.

Relevant Knowledge: Throughout their curriculum journey, children will acquire knowledge which is inspirational and culturally relevant. This repertoire of knowledge will prepare them for modern British society, allowing them to mediate cultural and factual references in their everyday lives. It will ignite a sense of awe and wonder that ensures children are interested, engaged and curious.

Our Approach to Teaching the Curriculum:

Engaging Experiences:. Every creative theme must include a visitor or visit. Over the course of a child’s primary schooling, they will experience a minimum of twenty one visits or visitors relating to their creative themes. These visits and visitors offer specialised knowledge upon which children can build their understanding of the subject. Each theme begins with an inspiring and powerful hook, intentionally thought-provoking to ignite a sense of curiosity in the children that will be sustained for a full term of work and create a strong point of reference.

Pupil Ownership: At the end of each creative theme, a group of children are interviewed to help staff evaluate the learning journey. Their opinions, references to key drivers and awareness of skills are used to inform future topics. We use artefacts to help this group of children develop questions for their next topics. This ensures that children have ownership over their own learning and that teachers can gauge children’s areas of interests to inform their planning.

SMSC: SMSC and Modern British Values (MBV) are woven into all aspects of the curriculum. Children develop their understanding of how actions affect themselves and others, learn about different communities and MBV: tolerance and respect, democracy, rule of law and liberty.

If you would like any more information about the Curriculum at Hillcrest please come into school and ask to speak to Mr Burton.

Creating Our Model:

We begin by planning using drivers and key skills, research and plan for engagement, then build curriculum contexts on these secure foundations. We are guided but not dictated by the National Curriculum. Our curriculum is developed by a working group including all major stakeholders. There is no requirement that all foundation subject areas will feature in each topic/theme.

We are a partner of GORSE SCITT (formerly Leeds Teaching School Alliance) which offers a dynamic route into teaching, providing high quality Initial Teacher Training around Leeds. New entrants to the teaching profession are able to train directly with the SCITT in schools within The GORSE Academies Trust and also in partner schools in the local area.

The trust has an outstanding record of recruiting trainees from its programme to newly qualified teaching positions within its schools and graduates from the SCITT are in high demand in schools outside of the Alliance.